Friday, February 21, 2020

Web archiving of social media for compliance

The dawn of the internet age has been revolutionary for humans. The social media platforms have further amplified the internet’s usage. Based on internet statistics, more than 3.4 billion people used social media worldwide in 2019. The number of mobile phone users has also increased to 5.1 billion in 2019. This has further increased the internet’s outreach to people. Moreover, the use of social media users is increasing globally by 9 percent. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc. are some of the major social media platforms used by people. Such high usage of these platforms generates enormous data on a day-to-day basis.

Due to so much data being generated online, it needs to be preserved to meet regulatory compliance. These regulations are laid by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). So, to avoid risks and fines, your organization should archive all the communication on social media portals.

Complexity in social media archiving

It isn’t easy to archive social media websites. These platforms are complex, interactive, and ever-changing. To give users great browsing experience, these platforms have expandable and intricate features. All these nitty-gritties cannot be captured just by taking a screenshot of the social media account. Until you have all the data captured properly, you will fail to meet compliance regulatory requirements.

How to archive social media

There are some points that you must look into a web archiving service that you are picking for archiving social media communications.

1. The archiving service should be able to capture the full context of communication happening through a social media account. All dynamic and complex features should be extracted and archived properly. The data should be stored in the WARC file format generated by a web crawl software.

2. The archived data should be saved in a robust storage format. SEC has defined Rule 17a-4, which mandates data storage in WORM format. WORM is a short form for ‘write once, read many’. The WORM storage devices are non-erasable and non-rewritable. Using this storage type ensures that the correct record is archived.

3. You should be able to navigate through the archived data based on keyword searches and other criteria. This will only be possible if your website is archived in a proper format with the right context. This makes it data access easy for eDiscovery and regulatory supervision.

The requirements mentioned above make the choice of a web archiving tool very difficult. Since the compliance regulations have to be met, you can’t even take shortcuts in data archiving. Stillio is one of the best archiving tools available in the market currently. It’s archiving software easily captures the dynamic nature and all the social media communications of a website. You can also navigate through the archived data without any hiccups. The storage is robust and compliant with the regulations. So don’t waste your precious time on budget vendors for archiving data for regulatory compliance. Reach out to the team at Stillio for knowing more about their tool’s features.

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